


Cellmates

by zuzeca



Category: Transformers (Bay Movies), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Aliens Made Them Do It, Bloodplay, Community: tf_rare_pairing, Consent Issues, Creepy Fluff, Failed Fluff, Imprisonment, M/M, Other, Sticky Sex, Withdrawn Consent, sort of, tf-rare-pairing Fanwork-A-Thon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-18
Updated: 2014-08-18
Packaged: 2018-02-13 16:23:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2157279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zuzeca/pseuds/zuzeca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Captured by hostile aliens on his quest to find his Creators, Optimus meets a stranger who is more than what he seems. Post-AOE.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cellmates

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the tf-rare-pairing July/August Fanwork challenge, for the prompt "Cosmos/Optimus – Aliens made them do it". I took the absence of continuity as a license to write Bayverse Cosmos. Bayverse Cosmos, as it turns out, is very strange. I swear this was supposed to be fluff, but it took a hard right somewhere in the middle and ended up somewhere weird. I have no words. PLEASE heed the content notes. Enjoy, if that's the right word for something like this.

Consciousness came, and with the awareness of a something sharp sticking between the plates of his armor, gouging at his protoform. Groaning, Optimus tried to turn over, only to find himself chained to the floor.

Battle protocols onlined in an instant and the chains shrieked and sparked as he fought them, but they were forged by someone or some _thing_ with awareness of the strength of his kind. The metal screamed in protest, but it held. Collapsing back, he sought his sword and found nothing.

“They took it away,” said a quiet voice from nearby. Turning his head, he caught a glimpse of blue visor, glowing at him from out of the gloom.

His spark jolted and his battle-addled processor glitched. He knew it to be impossible, unless he too had fallen, but he blurted “Jazz?”

“No.” Metal clanked as the newcomer dragged himself closer with agonizing slowness, and as he moved into the faint light streaming from the grates above them Optimus caught a glimpse of an Autobot brand seared into his shoulder guard, “But a friend.”

The bot was small, likely shorter than Bumblebee when upright. His gunmetal grey armor curved in great sheets that suggested a spherical or ovoid alt mode, pocked and soot-stained from blaster fire. His helm was round, and below the visor a blunt, flattened beak clicked open and closed independent of his speech. His limbs and body appeared intact, but he dragged himself as though leveled by some great injury.

Optimus’s scrambled datalogs failed to provide a positive identification, “What is your designation?”

The bot pulled himself into a seated position, “I am Cosmos.” He vented deeply, as though the words cost him great effort. “And you are Optimus Prime. Though I admit I wasn’t expecting such a renowned rescue party when I sent out that distress signal.”

“Distress signal?” Optimus searched his memory logs. “I am sorry, but I did not receive any such signal.”

“Figures,” sighed Cosmos. “I should have guessed when no one came for so long. Deep-space scouts don’t warrant rescue missions.”

Though Optimus’s battle computer still screamed at him to break free at all costs, the dejected words pierced the haze of calculations and he looked again at the tiny bot. “There are fewer of us than ever, but that is no excuse. I am sorry you were abandoned.” He indicated the cell around them, dank and dark, more of a pit than a prison. “Tell me of our captors, perhaps I can help you.”

“An impressive offer from someone chained on his back,” said Cosmos. “There isn’t much to tell. They’re collectors. They like shiny objects and don’t particularly care if said shiny object happens to be sentient and object to being collected.”

“Then they,” Optimus’s spark rolled within him, “they are not the Creators?”

Cosmos’s visor sharpened, “No. But it is interesting that you would be looking for _them_.”

“What do you know of them?”

“More than most. You don’t spend ten millennia tooling around galaxies without picking up something of their movements.”

Hope and determination pulsed in him, “You can lead me to them.”

Cosmos gave him a long and wary look, “Perhaps. But I don’t think you would like what’s at the end of that road.”

“I must find them.” The Seed, in unusual deference to luck and mercy, still sat warm and heavy in his subspace, missed by the magpies that had picked his body over. “It is my duty, to find them, to stop them.”

Cosmos sat silent for a few moments, “Very well. Get us out of here and I will lead you where I can.”

Optimus nodded to the blasters on Cosmos’s bracers and greaves, “Can you break the chains?”

Cosmos laughed hollowly, “I did once. They didn’t bother to replace them, just left me here to rust. Now? It’s an effort just to stay sitting up. Hyper-efficient engines last a long time, but they’re not perpetual. I’m almost empty.”

Staggering, the amount of time necessary to burn up the resources of a deep-space scout; it had to have taken eons, eons of darkness and isolation. A strange yet familiar swell of compassion rippled through Optimus’s spark. It had been ages since he had given of himself. Burned and hollowed out by the repeated ravages of war and betrayal, if asked he would have said that there was nothing of himself left, but now, faced with the quiet fortitude of the bot before him, Optimus found he had something more to give. “Then we shall share.”

Cosmos’s visor brightened, though he looked hesitant, “Are you certain it’s…well, proper?”

“It has been a very long time since I have concerned myself with propriety,” said Optimus. “Come here, please.”

Easier said than done, Cosmos rolled himself forward with aching sluggishness. Grasping the latticework of chains that criss-crossed Optimus’s body, he drew a deep ventilation in and made a burst of effort, dragging himself up to perch on Optimus’s chassis. Panting, he rested there, legs stretched barrel-wide to brace himself in place.

“My fuel tank bypass is to the right of you,” said Optimus, shifting to allow some of his armor to lift out of the way.

Small, blunt fingers groped the hatch open, uncoiling the thick cable. Cosmos took it gently and popped his own hatch, exposing a port and cable array, far smaller than Optimus’s, but Cosmos brought the cable close and the scanners activated, rearranging the head until it could slip snuggly into the tiny port.

Optimus rested his helm against the floor against the dizzying rush as energon began to flow out of him. Above him, Cosmos moaned and nearly collapsed, catching himself against Optimus’s chassis. “Oh,” he said, visor flaring bright “oh, that’s…”

“Alright?”

“Better than,” Cosmos shuddered, fingers flexing against Optimus’s plating. Optics blind, he ground his interface hatch against Optimus. “By all that’s holy, your spark—” He arched forward and pressed his face to the plating above Optimus’s sparkchamber, the edge of his beak scraping the metal and raising tiny, visible prickles of charge. “It’s huge,” he gasped, “swollen, overflowing, like it’s going to burst right out of you.”

Something dark coiled within Optimus and the image of crimson optics seared across his memory banks. “My brother,” he ground out.

“A twin, are you?” said Cosmos, his hatch retracting and his valve sliding wet and eager across hot metal, propriety vanished. “He came back to you then, didn’t he? They always do.”

“A mockery,” said Optimus, twisting in his bonds even as his spike pressurized and jutted between them. Pleasure seared across his neural net as Cosmos pushed it down against his ventral plating and began to glide his valve along the length of it, lubricants glossing the densely packed sensors and sending jolts of charge between them, “A sparkless machine, wearing my brother’s face.”

Cosmos laughed softly, “Not out there.” He waved one hand, the movement discordant but stronger already as energon flooded into him in a torrent. His palm clanged against Optimus’s chassis, “In here. Just waiting to burst out and rejoin you.” Delirious, he pushed back, trying to take Optimus in and they both groaned as his valve dilated open, catching the tip of Optimus’s spike and squeezing tight. “Slag and _sparks_ you’re big.”

_That is why I have no fear._

Optimus’s helm struck the deck beneath them and static buzzed across his vision, “No soul.”

Cosmos looked up at him, visor gleaming with eerie perception as he slid himself down on Optimus, “Not yet.”

Optimus’s battle computer screamed warnings and he fought his bonds once more, “Who are you?”

“Nobody,” murmured Cosmos. His beak twitched in parody of a smile. “They didn’t give us names. Those we took for ourselves.”

“You serve them,” spat Optimus.

“Never,” said Cosmos. “But make no mistake, Optimus Prime, I want my Creators dead, and there is but one mechanism, one _weapon_ in the known universe capable of rendering them to ashes.” His valve clamped painfully tight and Optimus overloaded with a helpless shout. “If you want my guidance, you will deliver it.”

“You know not what you ask.”

“I have stood before the judgment seat of monsters,” said Cosmos. “I have climbed from the smelting pools; I have walked the lines of mechanized death. The Protector’s domain is justice and I will see justice done.”

“And you would see Megatron mete it out?” shouted Optimus, a frisson rippling across his neural net, as though speaking the name might summon him, dissolving and reforming out of the darkness, a gaping hole yawning where a spark should be. “He has lost the right to do so!”

“Then let him redeem himself in the blood of our Creators,” said Cosmos, his voice hard. He pulled himself bodily off of Optimus, yanking the cable free. The flow of energon ceased. “Those are my terms. You may take them, or you may rust.”

“Slag you,” snarled Optimus, offlining his optics. “On your head be it.”

Cosmos’s blasters cycled on with a high whine. “I have seen stars born and burn out,” he said. Plasma discharged, searing a path through one of the heavy links. “I am certain I will find some way to live with myself.” 

Optimus rose, hefting the chains that had bound him before curling them around his fists, leaving long whip-like trailing ends. They would serve until he could retrieve his sword. “Let’s roll out,” he said bitterly.

Cosmos smiled, “As you will, my Prime.”


End file.
